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Britney Spears recently revealed she’s going to be taking math classes so she can keep up when her older son learns pre-Algebra … and it’s not just celebs like Spears who need some extra help when it comes to understanding their kids’ school work. Of course, most of us non-famous folk don’t go so far as to return to school just for that reason. (Way to go the extra mile, Brit!) Instead, we turn to everyone’s favorite resource: Google.

I asked parents to tell me what strange, perplexing homework question or issue forced them to seek guidance on the Internet and here’s how they responded.

Kyle Evans planned on a long career in the military, until a few sticks of dynamite put an end to that dream. The explosives, Evans remembered, “blew up directly under my feet” as he traveled by Humvee through Mosul, Iraq, in 2007.

The Army staff sergeant survived but sustained a traumatic brain injury that put an abrupt end to his deployment. He left Iraq and in 2010 retired from the military. Evans, a Virginia native, returned to civilian life with a purple heart medal—and grim career prospects. He took a low-paying job in Orlando working for the Department of Veterans Affairs, but he knew he wanted more. It was time for a new dream, one that meant going to college.

But when it comes to one particular, tech-driven trend, I’ve realized I’m a Luddite — and an unrepentant one at that. I, drumroll please, don’t speak emojii.

I’ve been known to sprinkle smiley or sad faces here and there, but I use them sparingly and in conjunction with the good ol’ English language, not in place of it. It’s true that a picture can say a thousand words, but a centimeter-tall icon? Not so much.

Which is why I find recent news from across the pond profoundly disturbing.

Tara Berberich readily admits that she doesn’t handle technology as well as many of her college classmates. She gratefully accepts their help for assignments that, say, involve a PowerPoint presentation. But Berberich brings her own strengths to the table, too.

“With age comes wisdom, so I know a lot of things they didn’t know from way back,” she said. “I could draw on my experience from stories that I knew from before they were born.”

Berberich, 53, is part of a growing population—college students who are older, in some cases significantly older, than the 18-to-24-year-old cohort typically associated with campus life.

For parents, especially mothers, it’s not uncommon to drop out of the labor force while caring for young children, only to return once the kids are older. Data released by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2014 shows that mothers with older children (age 6 and up) are more likely to be in the workforce than those with infants and preschoolers.

But securing a new job after a prolonged period at home can be challenging, especially if you haven’t updated your résumé in years. Fortunately, there are options for stay-at-home parents seeking to impress employers with skills honed both at old jobs and, more recently, outside the workplace.

…[Sonya] Romero-Smith’s toughest day, she said, came when authorities removed a malnourished child from her classroom after it was discovered that one of his parents had overdosed on drugs.

“Having a 5-year-old beg not to be taken away by police was devastating. I remember I gave this child the only thing I could find which was a stuffed toy that I had in the class,” she said. “I told this child that I would make sure he was OK and that all I wanted him to do was love and care for this stuffed toy.”

It was Romero-Smith’s desperate, last-ditch effort to comfort the traumatized boy … and, amazingly, it seemed to work.

When professionals in suits and ties descend on college campuses, it’s often for career fairs or other recruiting events. For the nattily dressed John DiGiovanni, the idea of sizing up fresh talent wasn’t far from his mind — but the Wayne native, a salesman for the global clothier Tom James, had a more immediate reason for coming to William Paterson University on a recent sunny autumn day…

Do you speak “parentese” with your baby? If not, you might want to start. A new study has found that infants and young toddlers exposed to more “parentese” through one-on-one interactions with their caregivers had much larger vocabularies by age 2 than their peers.

The findings “are consistent with the idea that infants’ early speech and later word production may be related to the social context and the style of speech directed toward the child,” researchers from the University of Connecticut and the University of Washington wrote in an article to be published in the journal Developmental Science.

So what exactly is “parentese”? Think baby talk, but less “googoo, gaga” and more “shooooes” and “diiiaper.”

The most selective universities in the country this year posted record-low admission rates that dipped into the single digits — a result, many officials say, of sky-high application totals. As colleges such as Harvard and Princeton released their rates, they also touted the diverse backgrounds of successful applicants, who include students of color and international candidates.